


a crooked mile

by midrashic



Series: conjurings [1]
Category: James Bond (Craig movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Homophobia, Alternate Universe - The Conjuring, Community: MI6 Cafe | mi6_cafe, Established Relationship, Haunted Houses, M/M, Married Couple, Occult October Challenge, POV Outsider
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-31
Updated: 2018-10-31
Packaged: 2019-08-11 08:32:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,908
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16472198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/midrashic/pseuds/midrashic
Summary: James and Q Bond have been sued four times for fraud, written up in countless sceptical myth-busting journals and spiritual rags alike, approached several times for their own TV show, inspired many a “based on a true story” disclaimer, and described as the crown jewel of the underground world of paranormal investigators, predators, kooks, the barmiest men in London, and heroes.





	a crooked mile

**Author's Note:**

> Established relationship Bond x Q. Takes place in a universe where there's no homophobia and nothing hurts. Rated T for supernatural terror and non-explicit sex.
> 
> Warnings: mentions of animal cruelty.
> 
> Beta'd by [zerozerokyu](https://archiveofourown.org/users/zerozerokyu/pseuds/zerozerokyu). [tr-ashaesthetic](https://tr-ashaesthetic.tumblr.com/) on tumblr did [a totally stunning aesthetic board](http://midrashic.tumblr.com/post/181697105541) based on this fic. Send them _so much love._

NOW:

Moneypenny climbs out of her trusty Jeep in a row of neat terrace houses in one of London’s more residential chunks. It’s a nice neighbourhood—cramped, but filled with the freshness and bubbling energy of children and young couples. There’s an overturned toy bike spinning its wheels morosely in the yard in front of her. She wants 36, next door. The door opens before she can get all the way up the walk and a man steps out to greet her.

“Wow,” she says, “it’s almost like you’re psychic.”

“I’ve heard that one before, but it’s really just my sense of dramatic timing,” the man in trousers pressed with military neatness and an unbearably elegant blue sweater says to her, a wry grin quirking his mouth. James Bond, she remembers from the dossier. “No cameraman today, Miss Moneypenny?”

“Not today. Today I’d just like to get some background, get comfortable with both you and the location, and then next week we can see about bringing the camera in, if that’s all right with you?”

“Well, it’s not as though we agreed to be in this piece for vanity’s sake.”

Moneypenny pounces. You don’t always get a good opening to ask the questions you want to ask, so when you do, you seize the moment. “Why did you agree to be in this piece? You and your… partner?”

“Husband.”

“—husband are notoriously reclusive.”

“I wouldn’t say notoriously,” a soft, clear voice rings out from under the eaves. Moneypenny turns; and standing half in shadow, barefoot, squinting out into the hazy London sunshine as though it was as bright as the Sahara is Q, the other half of the infamous pair of mediums that haunt Berkeley Square. “We give an interview once in a…”

“Decade,” fills in James from the walk.

“Well, it’s a chore weeding out the sceptics looking to generate a hot take about the psychics in Mayfair from those looking for a more nuanced portrait of what we do,” Q says, just as dry as James. “And we certainly don’t need to give them any more fodder to label us frauds. But I read your oeuvre, Miss Moneypenny. I was impressed with the way you reported on various religious practices in India. Respectful.”

“Oh—thank you.” Moneypenny colours. That’s not usually what most people associate with her byline. They’re more likely to bring up her lurid exposés of celebrity depravity. This is a quieter piece for her, a career pivot of sorts, and it’s still about psychics in Mayfair.

James frowns at where Q is squinting out at them both. He gravitates back toward the house; Moneypenny suspects that if she weren’t there, he would’ve tucked his husband’s face into the curve of his neck. “You shouldn’t be outside. The wind—”

“I’ll be fine for two minutes, you inveterate worrier,” Q grumbles, but retreats. James holds the door open for Moneypenny.

The home of a psychic, she notes down mentally, is as well-kept as the house of any other couple. There are sofas, and end tables, and lilies blooming in a vase filling the hall with the clean, light scent of flowers. The curtains are thrown back, letting natural light fill up the nooks and crannies of the sitting room. “Tea?” Q asks.

“I’ll get it,” James says quickly, and ducks into a kitchen that seems just as spare and bright as the rest of the house. Moneypenny allows herself to sink into an indecently plush sofa. Q perches across from her, quick green eyes flicking between the notepad she reflexively carries to her towering heels ( _Just because you_ can _dress down doesn’t mean you should, darling,_ her mother’s voice rings in her ears with a clarity it hasn’t had since her erstwhile teenage years) to her unbound natural hair to the way she, too, is assessing everything about him, making mental notes and marching paragraphs into place to describe him later. He smiles at her. She thinks she likes Q Bond.

James descends with an antique tea tray. Moneypenny takes a sip, surprised as the clean smokiness of lapsang souchong bursts on her tongue. “How did you know this is my favourite tea?” she asks. “ _Don’t_ say it’s the psychic thing.”

James winks at her. “I have a knack.”

“He’s a terrible cheat,” Q laughs over his own steaming cup. “He asked your producer.”

“Well, we’re going to be getting to know each other _very_ well, Miss Moneypenny,” James says, deep and sonorous. “We want to get off on the right foot, don’t we?” 

Moneypenny doesn’t blush, because she is a journalist and journalists are unflappable. She does shoot a glance at Q, who remains as amused and unthreatened as ever at this blatant flirting.

“It’s my policy, actually,” he says. “Anyone who spends more than a few hours in our house gets their own tea. I find it soothes tempers enormously.”

“Not everyone gets the shakes after half a day without caffeine,” James says fondly to his husband.

“It’s a comfort thing,” Q continues blithely. “The people who come to us are often in dire need of it. They’ve been pushed so far out of their comfort zones, backed up against the very edge of what they thought the world could contain. They come to us for comfort more than anything. The tea helps.”

James is looking at Q with a warmth that seems out of his place on his coldly handsome features. Q rests his head against James’s shoulder, feet curled up underneath him. They look so happy. So normal. Just another couple of young professionals in their small but well-loved flat having a friend over for tea.

James and Q Bond have been sued four times for fraud, written up in countless sceptical myth-busting journals and spiritual rags alike, approached several times for their own TV show, inspired many a “based on a true story” disclaimer, and described as the crown jewel of the underground world of paranormal investigators, predators, kooks, the barmiest men in London, and heroes. Moneypenny knows better.

“So what do you want to know, Miss Moneypenny?” James says, his voice softened indelibly by the nearness of Q.

“Let’s start with your work,” Moneypenny says, and pulls out her lucky pen.

“Mostly, it’s debunking stories of supernatural activity,” James says. “A leaky pipe or faulty insulation causing strange sounds in the night.”

“Really!”

“Not exactly glamorous, is it?” James smirks.

“And yes, sometimes, we see ghosts,” Q says ruefully. “But really, that happens much less often than you would think for a professional medium.”

– ♠ –

THEN:

The first time Q met James Bond, they were both standing under the great domes of St. Paul’s, mosaic ceilings spiralling out over them like the arched heavens. Q was tucked quietly away in a back pew, sketching. James was receiving a tour from a very excitable deacon and had stopped to crane his neck back to look at the great depiction of creation slanting way above his head. James met his eye and smiled at him, and Q sensed, in the way that he had sometimes sensed and dispelled his siblings’ nightmares growing up, that this too was a man who was looking into the strange malevolent energy Q had noticed during his architecture class’s tour last Friday that had descended over this, London’s brightest, most recognizable church, and that this was someone powerful, fortified in spirit and body, someone who would cause him a great deal of trouble in the future. He would never be sure what caused James to interrupt his tour guide midsentence, stroll over, and peek over Q’s shoulder, where his sketch of the ceiling lay abandoned in his lap. “An artist?” he asked.

“An appreciator,” Q said, letting his eyes settle over James’s suit—not as well-cut as the wardrobe he would acquire in later years, but very nice nonetheless. A little threadbare at the edges, rather like the man in front of him. “And you, Mr…?”

“Bond,” James said, “James Bond. I’m a specialist, of sorts. The Church calls me in when they come across certain… problems of a nature they’re ill-equipped to handle.”

Q would never guess what had possessed him to murmur, “Are you an exorcist, Mr. Bond?” but it made James smile, in the wolf-way he had of smiling back then. James flashed teeth at him and Q was not in love, not then, but he saw straight to the core of his soul in that moment and something sang in him.

“Only priests are allowed to perform exorcisms, and I can assure you I’m not one of those. I’m a man,” he said, “who would very much like to take you for a drink.”

“Well,” Q said, “as long as you’re paying. I’m an art history student, you know. On a rather tight budget.”

And that night, after James had battled the _thing_ rising up out of the boiler room shadows and Q had mixed him a martini that he deemed the best drink he’d ever had, after Q had confessed that he’d gone back and back to St. Paul’s after that fateful field trip because something had been stirring in the shadows that he could see, even clearer than James could, and he had been frightened and determined and brave, after James had held his hand and Q had kissed the bruise that bloomed violet-bright across his forehead—they had kissed, the first of many kisses, the first of a lifetime.

– ♠ –

NOW:

“Is that what you are, then?” Moneypenny asks over her second cup of tea. The lucky pen has been put down; the tape recorder has come out, mostly so that she can wrap her hands around the delicately carved china better. “Mediums?”

“It’s better than nutters,” James says, voice steeped in humour.

“People call us lots of things,” Q says, unperturbed. “Demonologists is one. Mediums is another. Paranormal investigators, researchers of the supernatural… ghost hunters, psychics, experts of the occult.”

“And what do you call yourselves?”

“Q and the muscle,” Q says promptly. James rewards him with a jab in the side, causing Q to laugh and squirm. “Mr. and Mr. Bond. It doesn’t matter what anyone calls us.”

“We help people, to the best of our abilities,” James says firmly. “There’s not really a taxonomy to what we do. Most of those terms are accurate in one way or another.”

“Even ‘nutters,’” Q laughs.

“Speak for yourself,” James murmurs, and presses a kiss into Q’s dark curls.

“Oh, I do,” Q says smugly. “Why else would I have married you?”

“Wounds and arrows, that’s all I get from you.”

Moneypenny gives the sweetness a moment to settle before she presses on, “And how do you do that? Help people?”

“In whatever way we can,” Q says.

“Most of it is reassuring people that whatever’s going bump in the night in their home has a perfectly rational explanation,” James says. “It’s rare to come across a genuinely supernatural occurrence.”

Moneypenny leans forward. This is the meat of it, the mystery at the heart of the story. “And when you do get wind of a good haunting?”

“Most hauntings are urban legends, actually. Most human souls lack the power to stick around after death. Sometimes they can become trapped, and if they took place in dark rituals they may gain the power to linger after death, but they’re generally not harmful on their own. There’s almost always something more sinister at work,” James says.

“So what is your work really like, then?” Eve asks, puzzled.

Q and James share looks. “It depends on the kind of event,” Q explains. “What we see most often are cursed objects.”

“Like a witch’s curse?”

“Not exactly. ‘Cursed object’ is a bit of a misnomer, actually. Most humans don’t have the power or ability to tap into the supernatural. Most Wiccanism and witchery is just an expression of spirituality, like any other religion,” Q says.

“A cursed object happens when an inhuman spirit or other powerful force of evil leaves… residue as it passes through this world,” James says. “Cursed objects aren’t conscious. It’s like radioactive fallout. It’s spiritually poisonous to humans. Weak cursed objects just feel… off to the sensitive.”

“A creepy lamp in an antique store,” Q puts in. “An heirloom no one wants.”

“More powerful cursed objects, though, can cause real damage.”

“And what do you do with those?” Moneypenny asks.

“Sometimes a good blessing can get rid of an unholy presence. We have a priest on call.”

“Catholic?”

“Anglican,” James says with a quirk of his lips. “It’s what works best in England. The most effective measures against evil vary by geography. In Italy, a Catholic rosary is powerful protection. In Morocco, a mosque would be the safest refuge if anything were after you. Anglicanism is in the bones here, though.”

“And James was raised C of E and he’s loyal as an old wolfdog,” Q says.

“That too,” James says, warmer.

“What about the cursed objects a blessing can’t protect you from?” Moneypenny asks, captivated in spite of herself. It’s like sitting on her Nan’s knee again, hearing fairy stories that half amused her and half frightened her out of her wits. An hour in this house and she can tell that Q and James _believe_ , which might make them dangerous or delusional, but also makes them _fascinating_ , and believe with an intensity that shakes her own scepticism.

“We keep them safe,” James says simply. The phone rings; James pushes Q back down when he rises and goes to answer it himself.

Q scowls after him, turns back to Moneypenny, and adds, “They’re in storage, on hallowed ground. We have a priest over once a month to refresh the blessings.”

“Isn’t that dangerous? Being in such close proximity to… evil.” Moneypenny rolls the word around on her tongue. She doesn’t deal in a world of good and evil. She deals, mostly, in a world of glitter and cheap fame and cocaine. But sitting here, in this normal home in a normal street in a normal, if well-off, part of London, she senses a shadow of something out there in the world. Something huge, and malevolent, and terrifying.

“Better with us than anywhere else,” Q says cheerfully.

“Why not just destroy them, if they’re so dangerous?”

“It’s harder than you think. Even magic obeys the rules of physics. Evil can neither be created nor destroyed. Sometimes destroying the vessel frees it to place its mark on something else. Sometimes, some _one_ else.”

“Is that when possessions happen?” Moneypenny asks eagerly.

For the first time, a chill descends over the sun-warm sitting room. Q shifts. Moneypenny is about to backtrack, to apologize, to bewilderedly try to learn why exorcisms are verboten in the Bond household, when Q says softly, “Possessions—the kind that requires exorcisms—are vanishingly rare, and are the work of something stronger than a mere cursed object. An inhuman spirit… or worse. It takes something truly powerful to be able to inhabit a person—to overwrite their will—to condemn their soul to Hell in spite of their actions in life.”

Moneypenny pauses. Something about the way Q says “Hell,” as if it’s a place as real as the Tesco’s down the corner. “Do you believe in God, Q?” she asks.

“I have to,” Q says. “It would be a hard world for someone who knew the Devil was real but doubted the existence of God.”

James reappears in the doorway, saving Moneypenny from having to wrap her mind around that and come up with a response. “Yes,” he says. “I’ll ask.” He tucks the phone into his shoulder and asks Moneypenny, eyes gleaming, “Are you doing anything tonight?”

“Not a thing,” she says reflexively. She has a date, actually, but a good journalist knows when to cancel when a scoop is dangling itself in front of her like bait.

“Well then, Miss Moneypenny,” James says, “how would you like to accompany me to a real live haunted house?”

– ♠ –

THEN:

They met again. And again.

Coffee shops, art museums while Q took down notes for his homework and James loitered at his shoulder, and once a fancy restaurant with fairy lights strung up between the tables as the cool evening air settled on their skin. They held hands, or kissed, sweet lingering morsels meant to prolong the night. They talked—about James’s lonely childhood on the Scottish moors, Q’s rambunctious brothers tumbling out of their tiny walk-up in East London, ice cream, architecture, the best way to take tea. Q’s love of horrible cheap mystery novels. Whatever new fuckery was happening in Westminster. They walked back to the cramped brick building Q shared with nine other students and sat on the stoop and talked more, long into the night, pretending that James would leave in the next minute, the next ten minutes, the next hour, or that the night could stretch on forever.

Q was wickedly, headily smart. It took all of James’s wits to keep up with him. He knew full well that he had a terrible weakness for people who could run rings around him in their sleep. On a cloudy night, Q’s slight bulk wrapped in that godawful raincoat and James’s arm over his shoulder for extra warmth, the morning beading into existence like dew on the scrubby patch of grass outside Q’s building, James let his breath huff out into the cold air and told him about the spirit that had survived by jumping from book to book, robbing the speech of anyone it came into contact with. “So how did you defeat it?” Q asked, enthralled.

“I shot it with an epistle.”

Q laughed loudly and brightly, like the sun coming up at 2 AM in London. Lights flickered on upstairs. “You’re like something out of a Terry Pratchett novel,” he said admiringly.

James’s mouth turned up. “Terry Pratchett? Really, Q?”

“Don’t tell me you’re one of those bores who think children’s books don’t have anything to teach the old and dull.”

“Christ,” James said, just to get Q to scowl at him, “I’m robbing the cradle.”

“Oh, don’t start. What have all those grown-up books taught you, Mr. Bond? Go on, then. Dazzle me.”

“Mostly,” James said, “to seize a good thing when it stumbles your way.”

“Boring,” Q sniffed.

James leaned closer. Q smelled like something as sharp and memorable as his tongue, like pine trees in winter or a fresh-sanded cabinet. “All right. Show me your glorious, beautiful book-world.”

“Ever read _Good Omens_?”

“Is that the one with the boy who goes to magic school?”

“You’re deplorable,” Q laughed.

“Believe it or not, I have picked up a book or two in my advanced years.”

On their second date, James had seen Q stop at the public library and erase fourteen years of run-ins with the Met from their databases in under twenty minutes. On their third, they’d had an extensive conversation about Q’s field of study in which James had held his own. But it was here, on the cold concrete steps of Q’s building, talking about children’s books at two-thirty in the morning, that James saw Q’s cheeks flush with passion and love for the first time. “It’s about the end of the world, and prophecies that come true.”

“Don’t tell me you believe in fate, Q.”

“Don’t you? I believe we make our own choices, but no one can know the music to which we all dance. That fate and free will are indistinguishable. That everyone has choices. And mine led me to you.”

James kissed him. Partly to shut him up, partly because in that moment he had looked so unbearably bright and real, like a new penny in the pocket, like the heart of a star.

– ♠ –

NOW:

The house is a creakily sprawling thing built during the 18th century, a Georgian monstrosity that might have fetched a pretty penny if it wasn’t so totally decrepit. As it is, the nice middle-class family that moved there in the hopes of fixing it up looks frazzled, dishevelled, and scared out of their wits. Moneypenny stands under the portico and considers gloomily that she’ll probably have to brush up on her architecture vocabulary if she wants to be able to set the scene in the piece she’ll end up writing about all this. Q stands next to her, studying the dusty windows crawling up the side of the house. He looks like he’s concentrating intently on something just invisible to the naked eye. The wind stirs his hair.

After the phone call, James and Q had had a brief but furious argument over whether or not Q would accompany them—but though Moneypenny is a journalist, she also knows better than to antagonize the subjects of a long-form piece on their first day together, and so had stood by the fireplace and pointedly not listened to the heated whispers drifting her way from the kitchen. Q seemed to have outlasted James’s fierce worry and relentless hovering to join them in James’s car—a classic Aston Martin, of all things, all thick bonnet and silver curves—for the two-hour drive out of the city and up to the house that the Bonds’ contact at the Church wants them to take a look at. 

James is talking to the Cobbs now, a squat woman with a deeply lined face and her thin, nervous-looking husband. Their younger daughter is hiding behind them. James speaks to them with a kindness that surprises her, because for all his tenderness towards his husband, James Bond still seems to her to have the features and bearing of a hard man. Now, she watches as he kneels down to eye-level with the girl to ask, “Have you seen or heard or felt anything out of the ordinary lately?”

“The birds keep dying,” she whispers back.

“It’s the damndest thing,” her father jumps in. “We get all sorts of birds—even had a goose once—flying against the side of the house and breaking their necks. Now, we used to get that kind of thing occasionally in our old house, but here it seems like the whole bloody forest is out to get us.”

Q turns to walk the perimeter of the house. Moneypenny wavers between following him and staying with James, who doesn’t even look up. “And the visual apparitions?” he asks.

“Sometimes I’ll see blood,” the mother says stiffly. “Just… dripping from places. The pipes, or the—the stairs. I bit into an apple and I looked and there was…”

“The shadows,” her husband says. “They aren’t… right. Too long, too dark. Like they follow you, from room to room. I know it sounds mad…”

“Not to me,” James says, and stands. “Why don’t you show me around the house?”

The house, Moneypenny admits, is creepy as hell. Long, dark stairways, floorboards that creak ominously. Low-ceilinged, claustrophobic bedrooms and living spaces that seem to emanate emptiness where the furniture isn’t quite enough to fill in all the gaps. The Cobbs give them a macabre tour, pointing out what supernatural impossibility happened here and what terror confronted them there. James takes it all in with studied nonchalance. From the boot of his ridiculous car he pulls out a video store’s worth of recording equipment and scatters it throughout the house, angling cameras in strategic corners, placing sensors in the places of greatest activity. Moneypenny just tries not to let the clammy, oppressive bleakness of the house get to her long-held belief that everything has a rational explanation. But—what was it that James said about cursed objects? The whole place just feels _off_. 

James thanks the family and steps back outside. Q is leaning against the side of the car. James pauses at the threshold; Moneypenny glances at him and watches him drink in the sight of the car and Q, sunlight caught in his hair and cheeks reddened from cold. Q is looking at the huge bare-limbed tree that arcs up over their heads with a complicated expression on his face, something between distance and horror.

At the car, James says smoothly, “I must apologize to you, Miss Moneypenny. I hadn’t thought when I invited you that I’d be taking you along to a real ghost hunt.”

“So you believe them, then?” Moneypenny asks.

“The cold, the figures they claim to see in their peripheral vision, the dead animals… it’s all consistent with our experiences with hauntings.”

“Or mass hysteria, or a hoax.”

“I’ve been doing this for many years, Miss Moneypenny. I’ve seen people who are in it for the fame and money, and my instinct and years of experience tells me that the fear the Cobbs feel isn’t faked.” He turns to Q. “What do you think, Q—Q?”

“I talked to Abby, the older daughter,” Q says, still looking at the bulk of the branch spearing the air above their heads. “She says the house moves.”

James moves closer. “What do you mean, Q?”

“She says that she can walk down a hallway and never reach the end. That she’ll sometimes walk out the front door and find herself back in her bedroom. That she can get lost looking for the kitchen, or her sister’s room, and try a hundred doors and none of them the right one. That she’s starting to experience it at school. In her dreams.”

“Standard horror movie stuff,” Moneypenny says. But James looks confused. No. Concerned.

“I’ve never heard of a ghost powerful enough to warp reality around itself like that,” he says.

Q nods briskly. “And then there’s what I feel.”

“What is it?” James asks.

“The house,” Q says. He shivers. James is instantly by his side, wrapping his arm around Q’s shoulder; Q leans into him gratefully. “It’s like it’s screaming.” At last Q looks at James, whose concern is written on his face as clear as the pale sky above.

“Something terrible happened here,” Q says. “And it’ll happen again if we don’t stop it.”

– ♠ –

THEN:

James knew that Q was psychically sensitive—more than he himself was, as Q had been able to describe the thing in St. Paul’s as “pulsing, with teeth,” when all James had seen had been depthless shadows in his peripheral vision—but he didn’t know how sensitive until he locked a cursed doll in the closet for the night and Q woke screaming and scratching frantically at his face.

“Q!” He braced his shoulder against the headboard and with all his strength forced Q’s arms down to his sides. “Q! Stop! _Q!”_

Q let out a terrible wail, like there was something impaled in his soul and his fingers itched to yank it out, before blinking reddened eyes open at James. “James?” he asked, sounding slow, small, frightened.

“It’s me. Shh. I’ve got you. What happened? What was that?”

“There’s something in the closet,” Q whispered. “It wants to kill you.”

Which was how James discovered that his run-of-the-mill cursed object was actually infested with a poltergeist, lost his security deposit, and blacked his eye in front of Q for the first time. When the fight was over, he crawled back into bed, where Q had made a fort for himself and the bedside lamp under the sheets and pillows. James joined him, wrapped his arms around him, kissed him apologetically for almost getting him killed on their eighth date. He rested his chin on Q’s shoulder in the golden glow of the lamp and waited.

“Is it always like that?” Q asked at last, shakily.

James wanted to lie. More than that, he wanted to _keep_ Q, to hold on to this moment where Q was tucked safely into his body and nothing could hurt them, this moment where Q had his heart in his elegantly-shaped hands and was just holding it fast against the night. He wanted, with every fibre and bone in his body, for Q to stay. So he almost lied. He almost said, “No,” and let them both pretend that this night would be the worst of it, that Q would be safe, _could_ be safe, with him, with the life he led.

Until the next time. And the next.

“Yes,” he sighed, and waited for what he suspected was the best thing that had ever happened to him to wisp from his arms like so many ghosts.

Q half-turned in his embrace. The lingering horror of the nightmare was still etched into his expression, but for all that he looked fragile, he was determined, too. “Well,” he said imperiously, “you’ll need a partner, then, won’t you?”

James Bond had fallen in love before, usually to disastrous effect. This—was not like that at all. This was the swell of the sun coming up after a long night. This was the faint brush of home across his senses after weary months and years of travel. This was the cool waters of healing soothing an ache he hadn’t even realized he’d been carrying, an ache he’d been bearing on one shoulder since the start of the world, since he was expelled screaming, gasping for breath, aching for warmth, into the cold air of a Scottish hospital. This was the quiet signing over of the rest of his life to one person, without regret, without apology. This was the light falling across their bedsheets, quiet, private, the universe entire in its light.

– ♠ –

NOW:

The Bonds, it turns out, have a professional spirit photographer on call who they would normally bring in on cases like this but who is, at the moment, in the south of France celebrating his honeymoon for the next two weeks. So the next step, James tells her, is research. He drives them to the town library, asks for their records, and buries them in stacks of dusty pages. Moneypenny half-assists, half-watches and takes notes of her own, composing copy in her head. James spends half the time buried in books and half the time flirting with a librarian, which actually gets them much-needed access to the archival room despite not having special academic dispensation. Q hunches over an ancient, boxy computer, having done something to make the optical character recognition software turn microfilm into text at four times its normal efficiency. They work as a seamless unit, bending together over maps, making quiet remarks that only need to be halfway out of someone’s mouth before the other one finishes it.

They start with the auction at which the Cobbs had bought the house and work backwards, from the property disputes that left it standing vacant during the 1950s to the two girls that had gone missing from the nearby town in the 1910s to the dramatic murder-suicide of a previous owner and his ward in the 1880s. “Surely any place will have its fair share of tragedy if you look back far enough,” Moneypenny protests.

“Not like this,” Q says. “The violence, the suffering necessary to make this house what it is—it leaves a scar in the world. It will stand out.”

So they go back further. And further.

It’s James who finds it in the end, between the yellowing pages of a diary so falling-apart he has to handle it with gloves. “Listen to this,” he says. “The girl who wrote this was courting the owner of the manor house that predated the existing structure before he died in 1780 and it was torn down. His name was Silva. Raoul Silva.”

“So what’s so special about this girl?” asks Moneypenny.

“Not the girl, the man. The girl, Margret, says he hails from Basque. Zugarramundi. And I recognize his habits.”

Q leans over his shoulder. “’Rituals involving animal genitalia and extensive uses of poisons,’” he reads out. “He was a _sorgina_. A member of the Basque witch cult.”

“What does that mean?” Moneypenny asks.

“During the Inquisition, the Church launched the largest and most brutal witch hunt in history in Basque Country, far surpassing Salem in scope,” James said. “Thousands were tortured, most infamously the residents of Zugarramundi.”

“You think his family fled to England,” Q said.

“And decades later, Raoul Silva would commit an act of evil so horrific it would poison the land itself,” James said grimly. “Margret’s diary ends abruptly after she discovers his use of animal sacrifices. I think he upgraded.”

“He must have been very powerful,” Q said softly. “Even witches who kill, who have consecrated their souls to the Devil in that way—I’ve never heard of one strong enough to do what he’s doing. To fold time and space like the pages of a book.”

James absently brushed his fingers over Q’s hand where it was curled over his shoulder. “We should stay with the Cobbs tonight and drive out to the diocese tomorrow to present the evidence we’ve collected. Something like this… I don’t think we should wait for someone to get hurt.”

“Or our presence might make it worse,” Q pointed out.

James turned back to him, looking torn. “You should go back to London. I can—”

“James Bond, one more word out of you and you’ll be sleeping on the couch for the rest of the month.”

James looked mutinous. Q gave him a tiny sad smile and whispered something that sounded suspiciously like, “Not in front of the reporter, James,” that made him click his jaw shut obediently, if resentfully.

“Oh, don’t mind me,” Moneypenny said airily. “I’ll just be over here, paying no attention whatsoever.”

But Q just said, not without warmth, “This old worrywart doesn’t know when to quit.” Moneypenny watched Q rub his thumb in tiny comforting circles into James’s shoulder, watched James’s eyes soften as his fingers crept up to grasp Q’s. But the concern in his eyes didn’t dim, not at all.

– ♠ –

THEN:

They got married in a tiny chapel off Portobello Road with two witnesses they’d pulled in off the street. They’d chosen the church mainly for its proximity to the boutique hotel situated two blocks away. James wore a single stephanotis blossom in his boutonnière, which Q kept laughingly plucking at when James wasn’t looking so that James would seize his hands and kiss them to distraction. Q didn’t remember much about the ceremony itself, just snatches: the burst of sunlight coming in from the high glass windows reflecting off James’s hair, the feeling of James’s warm, rough hand in his, James’s blazing blue eyes locked on his own. He couldn’t remember if James had been smiling or what the priest had said, couldn’t remember much of anything beyond the helium-feeling of joy and ecstatic anticipation. It was all bright, and heartbeats, and bright.

James didn’t carry Q to the two blocks to the hotel; instead he settled for walking with his arms wrapped around Q’s waist, nose buried in his hair, sneaking kisses at every step, hands wandering not lustfully but like he was trying to touch every part of Q at once, trying to bring them so close to each other Q could step into his bones and live there forever. Q remembered the fever-flush of laughing that had taken over him, his face hot with happiness and kisses. He didn’t remember making it to the bedroom, but they must have somehow. He _did_ remember the astonishing, toe-curling pleasure in which he had spent most of the weekend, so the important things came through, he supposed.

After a particularly vigourous round of acrobatics, James had lain his head on Q’s shoulder and panted, “We should do that again.”

“You are _insatiable._ ”

“For you? Always.” James pressed a kiss to Q’s collarbone, then bit at the spot he had just kissed gently and playfully, really more of a nibble than anything.

Q toyed with the crucifix James wore even to sleep. “I’ll be waking up with a little Jesus imprinted on my cheek for the rest of my life, won’t I?”

“I like the reminder,” James said. He rolled onto his back and stretched luxuriously. “Do you remember when you asked me if I believed in fate?”

Q yawned. “Yes.”

“You know, I’m still not sure about the rest of it. But I know now… I met you for a reason. What we have, this blessing… it came to us for a reason. The crucifix reminds me of that. To never take what we have for granted. And to never be afraid.”

“Oh, you old romantic,” Q sighed. “I knew you had it in you.”

– ♠ –

NOW:

James offers to drive Moneypenny back to London as well, warning her that it might get dangerous, but Moneypenny is half flatly disbelieving of it all and half excited, given that part of the reason she wanted to write a piece about psychics in Mayfair in the first place was the thrilling possibility that she might see something supernatural herself. So she takes the younger daughter’s bedroom while James and Q take the older daughter’s. The Cobbs are all sleeping in the master bedroom tonight. They have a nice family dinner, James teasing life and warmth out of the Cobbs’ stilted conversation and Q listening raptly to every mundane story and anecdote they can throw at him. Afterwards, Moneypenny heads up to bed to put her notes in order. But she can’t sleep. Maybe it’s the idea of staying in a haunted house, or the eeriness of her surroundings, or maybe there really is something malevolent lurking in the closet. She lies in bed listening to the house creak around her, sternly telling herself that it’s the pipes, it’s the goddamn pipes. Eventually, she drags herself out of bed and heads downstairs. She keeps an emergency stash of five cigarettes in her purse. It feels like nicotine time.

There’s already someone sitting on the stone steps.

Moneypenny has a very unjournalistic moment of panic before she recognizes James’s straw-blond hair and broad shoulders. This assignment is getting to her. She ducks outside to join him, shivering as the wind cuts through her borrowed dressing gown. James is looking pensively into space, fingers curled around a smoke burning wanly through the dark.

“Great minds think alike,” she says.

He lets her light her cig off of his. “Addicts do too,” he says. “I’m trying to quit. Some days are longer than others.”

Moneypenny sits beside him, curious. He’s seemed so unflappable all day. What could rattle the infamous James Bond? “I thought this was an ordinary day for you?”

“Perhaps a bit more bizarre than usual,” James says. “If Abby Cobb is right about what she saw… this could be big. We’ll have to wait and see what the equipment picks up tonight, but I have a feeling.”

“You’ve actually been able to record the things you’ve seen?”

“We have to. The Church refuses to intervene without evidence. Sometimes our testimony—mine and Q’s—is enough to get them to send a priest over to bless a house or family. We’ve proven ourselves to be reliable witnesses over the years. But dispelling a force of evil this powerful… it’ll require an exorcism. And the Church won’t take that lightly.”

Moneypenny bites her lip. “But… if you have evidence… why not go public? Why let people say… the things they say about you?”

“Techniques used to fake photographs and recordings are getting better all the time, Miss Moneypenny,” James says simply. “It’ll always be easier to claim that the proof we collect has been doctored than to accept the idea that not everything in this world has a rational explanation. The paranormal is something you have to experience for yourself. After all,” he says wryly, “ _you’re_ still a sceptic, aren’t you?”

Moneypenny takes a drag on her cigarette and doesn’t answer. “Where’s Q?” she says instead.

“Sleeping,” James says stiffly. “He gets… tired easily.”

“Is he all right?” she blurts out before she can think better of it.

“Yes,” James says, clipped. He sighs smoke into the thin, cold night air. “No.”

“You can tell me. I won’t—write it down.”

Maybe James can hear the genuine concern in her voice for someone she’s beginning to think of as a friend, because he just stubs out his cigarette and grinds his heel into the butt and says, “There’s nothing special about me except what I’ve seen. Q—he’s the one with the gift. He’s clairvoyant.”

“He can see the future?”

“Sometimes. Or the past. Just glimpses, nothing concrete. He’s better at sensing presences than divination. But it means that with what we do, we have to be very careful. He’s… susceptible to the evil we encounter, in a way I’m not.” In the distance, an owl screeches. James stares out into the night, remembering. “The last time we were on a case, he saw something… he collapsed. When he woke, he didn’t talk for three days. He’s still not recovered.”

“What did he see?” Moneypenny asks softly.

“I don’t know,” James says. “I have seen him face terrible, truly frightening things and come out the stronger. I’ve no idea what could do this to him. I’ve been trying to get him to rest, to stay at home…” He runs a hand through his hair and chuckles. “He won’t have it, of course. Well. I knew he was stubborn when I married him.”

Eve Moneypenny is twenty-nine years old and has reported from Costa Rica, India, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Syria. She is back on home soil for the first time in three years and relentlessly compensating for the fact that her last assignment was in a warzone, just like she’s always wanted, and she froze. She has never had a relationship that lasted longer than a year. She is a workaholic. She knows that she has no experience with this thing that James is describing, with this longing to protect someone by locking them in your heart, secreting them between your ventricles, cushioning them with your cardiac muscle.

But she takes a smoky, night air-infused breath and says anyway, because she is tired, because James looks like he needs it, because she is sitting on the stoop of a haunted house with a medium and this is somehow her life, “You can’t force someone you love to be safe. You can try, but it won’t work. They get away from you sooner or later, they always do.” She thinks of her Mum sobbing as she stepped through security to board the plane to Damascus and her brother saying stonily, “ _Don’t make me watch you get killed, Evie, ‘cause I won’t do it,”_ about her three near-death experiences and the one that finally sent her packing, about the way she can’t decide whether or not she regrets it even though she’s writing up celebrity pap and her brother never talks to her anymore. “You can only be a safety net. Catch them when they fall.”

“Well,” James says wearily, and lights another cigarette. “To high-wire acts and defying death.”

“Amen,” Moneypenny says. They smoke in silence for a long time.

– ♠ –

NOW (NOW? ARE YOU SURE?):

Q opens his eyes. He’s alone.

“James?” he calls out softly, but the silence stares stonily back at him. He shivers. He misses the cat. Gideon always curls up next to him when James gets up early to brood or run or make breakfast. It’s cold in the Cobb house, which might be a draft and might be a demonic presence and might be his imagination. He sticks his feet into borrowed slippers and slips out to track down his wayward husband.

In the night, the low ceilings and creepy fixtures of the Cobb house disappear into the darkness, so as Q makes his way down the hall he’s followed by the unsettling feeling that he’s not safely sheltered from the elements after all but exposed to the piercing eye of the midnight sky. He passes darkened, noiseless rooms one after the other—and another—and another—until he’s certain that there weren’t this many doors when he went to bed. The silence is total. Not another thing breathes or moves in its sleep. He runs a hand against the horrid wallpaper and, without panicking, reflects that he’s probably not going to find James like this.

Sometimes the only way out is through. He keeps walking.

It’s a while before he hears it—or not _hears_ exactly, because the silence still rests as thick and dense around him as ever, but feels it. Whispers, just beneath conscious thought. It feels like fingers stealing out of the darkness to trace the line of his spine. He floats toward the not-sound. Space compresses on him. He’s on the stairwell, peering down into a seemingly endless spiral that goes far beyond the two stories of the Cobb house. He’s passing the stretch of blank wall where the front door should be, but isn’t. He’s stepping into the sitting room—

—and he’s somewhere else. The walls are stone, not brick. Light drips from candelabras set into the wall. The air is thick with smoke and—something else. Something of death and desecration. A man sits hunched over an old wood desk with his back to Q, blond hair brushing his shoulders, quill dangling loosely from a casual hand. His inkwell is filled with a dark glossy liquid, but the letters he’s scratched into vellum are drying into a crusty brown.

Q steps more fully into the light, unafraid of being seen. In his visions, he is an invisible observer, a pair of eyes without substance. The whispers are louder here. Not whispers anymore, but screaming. Nails scratched down an inaudible chalkboard. 

“My,” says the man in a musical voice, richly accented. He sets his quill down and turns to look at Q— _straight_ at him—Q freezes, but he’s not sure whether it’s the surprise or the cold _absence_ in the man’s eyes that shocks him into stillness—”This is new. Where did you fly from, little bird, to come and land in my palm?”

“Who are you?” Q says, cold as a glacier.

“Tch! Rude. I am master of this house and everything within its walls—including _you_ , little bird.”

“You’re the witch,” Q says. “Raoul Silva.”

“And _you_ do not belong here. But it’s _ever_ so much interesting now that you are.”

“Only one of us does not belong here,” Q says softly. “You’re dead, Raoul. Stop haunting these people and rest.”

“Ah, how long has it been for you since I have walked the earth? Years? Decades?”

“More like centuries.”

Silva laughs, a wild, throaty sound that sets every instinct of Q’s on edge. “Centuries! Centuries of life.”

“This isn’t life. This isn’t even death. It’s a cruel mockery of everything it is to be human.”

“Is it? Have you tasted from the Cup of Life? Its sweetness, its vigour?” Silva smiles, a shark-grin that threatens to swallow Q whole. “Or are you too busy dreaming your dreams and kissing your lover for ambition? Hm? _Q?_ ”

Ice in his blood. “How do you know me?”

“I told you. I _own_ you. The moment you stepped foot in this house, you were mine—are mine—will be mine.”

“You’re like me,” Q realizes hollowly. “You can see through the warp and weft of time. You’re clairvoyant.”

“And so much more now,” Silva purrs. “You think to expel me? Cleanse this dwelling with a splash of holy water and a few kind thoughts? I am not one of your silly little ghosts. I am not human. Not anymore. _I have fed my Lord with blood and bone and he has made me more.”_ Q clenches his fists, feels the nails bite into his skin. He’s only dreaming. But it feels so real. “It is a kind of immortality I have achieved, you see? The house’s bones are my bones, its dark heart my heart. And you—you are _mine_ now. You, and your frightened little family, and your intrepid girl, and your James. Time—what is time to a house? I exist in every moment. At every point in my existence I am watching you scream, and suffer, and die.”

Q pulls his composure over himself like a warm cloak in the night. “If you wanted that,” he says, forcing the words past terror-numb lips, “you would’ve done it already. Why haven’t you? Why are you warning me?”

“Clever little bird,” Silva whispers. “Look at the clock.”

In the corner of his eye, Q can see an ornate clock. The hands are ticking backwards. It is almost 3 AM. “What are you waiting for?”

“For you to run,” Silva hisses-laughs-shrieks. The dream shatters.

– ♠ –

NOW:

_“James!”_

James is running before Moneypenny can even process the scream curling through the corners of the house, but some instinct has evidently lingered from her war reporter days, because she’s right on his tail, sprinting through the draughty front hall and taking the thick marble stairs two at a time. Halfway up they collide with Q, shaking as though a chill wind has cut straight through Mr. Cobb’s terrycloth bathrobe and settled into his bones. Q hurls himself into James’s arms, who hunches over him protectively like he can shield Q with his shoulders alone.

“He knew,” Q is panting. “He knew we were coming—we have to get out of here, James, he’s, he’s too strong—we have to go, we have to get everyone out _now_ —”

“Slow down,” James says sharply. “What do you mean? Who knew we were coming?”

“Silva,” Q gasps out.

“The witch?” Moneypenny asks.

“I saw him—he’s become one with the house, James, and he’s feeding off of the people inside it—he’s so strong—we can’t wait for the footage, we need to go to the Church, we need to get an exorcist _now_ —”

Moneypenny still can’t understand half of what’s coming out of Q’s mouth, but James says, clipped, “Miss Moneypenny, wake up the Cobbs. We need to leave. Now.” His face is stone.

Moneypenny goes. The Cobbs, all crammed into the master bedroom, are already blinking awake blearily, but on seeing her they snap to attention. She wrangles them into their shoes and hustles them down the stairs to where James and Q are waiting on the landing, Q still pale as night and James’s shoulders taut with tension. “We need to get out of here _now,_ ” James says in military tones. The Cobbs, shaken but relieved that someone is finally having a sensible reaction to whatever’s been happening in their house for the last few months, go without complaint.

Moneypenny is not so sanguine. “What is _happening?_ ” she hisses to James as he herds the family towards the front door.

“Q had a premonition,” James says to her under his breath.

“A—what does that even mean?!”

“Scepticism later, run now,” James snaps. They hit the ground floor and they’re off, Moneypenny right behind Mr. Cobb as they skid across the foyer and out the front door—

—and into the dining room—

Moneypenny twists around and stares into the doorway they’d apparently just come from, which leads to the kitchen. Mrs. Cobb turns around in confused circles. “But—but that’s impossible!” Mr. Cobb sputters.

“It’s Silva,” Q says tautly. “He won’t let us leave the house.”

Somewhere upstairs, a clock starts to chime. And then the house begins to shake.

– ♠ –

THEN: 

The last exorcism James and Q Bond would assist on for a long time was a straightforward case—as straightforward as these things can ever be—of demonic possession in Sheffield. They’d performed it in the cellar of the man’s house. As he screamed and writhed and James and a burly clergyman struggled to hold him down, Q settled a reassuring hand on the possessed man’s shoulder, trying to be of some comfort in this most terrible of battles, this vicious, endless fight for a man’s soul.

During hour three of the exorcism, the man seized Q’s wrist and dragged him down to eye level. Q struggled to pull out of his grip, confused eyes wandering into the man’s gaze—and froze. And then he started to scream.

This was what he saw:

 _stone burning and pitch splattering and someone sobbing softly and a funeral, hail like tinsel and someone_ screaming _and water everywhere and an awful tightness in his chest and James screaming, oh, it was James screaming, and a demon’s face, like a wound in the world, candle wax melting and crosses cracking and mirrors flashing with faces that weren’t there when you turned around and crows screeching and a great tree with its arms all bare and bruised with winter and a man with a melted face and a boy with a horrible scar running through his right eye and James, always James, gagging, gasping, dying—_

He didn’t feel James’s arms around him or hear him shouting, “ _Turn the bloody camera off, Tanner,_ ” he was consumed with the visions painted more clearly into his mind than his own sight, the prickling agony of it, the taste like mercury bursting onto the back of his tongue. He was shattered through with the memory of something that hadn’t happened yet, the memory of losing the most precious, beloved part of his life. He was screaming, falling, breaking apart. He was wrestling the Devil for his soul, and the Devil was winning.

When they got back home, Q crawled into bed, pulled the covers over his head, and didn’t come out for three days.

– ♠ –

NOW NOW NOW:

Sound blazes at her from all directions. The shutters banging rhythmically, glass shattering upstairs, the children screaming. This—this is—Moneypenny doesn’t know what this is. Q doesn’t seem bothered by the chaos erupting around him. He turns to James and says, in a quavering but sure voice, “We need an exorcism _now_.”

“There’s no time,” James says sharply. “Even if we could get a priest out here—”

“Then you need to do it.”

James stares at him helplessly. Moneypenny pushes the terrified family out of her mind and edges closer, shouting to be heard above all the noise, “What’s the problem?”

“Only priests are authorized to perform exorcisms,” James says. “I’ve assisted on many, but I’ve never—”

“You can do it,” Q says firmly. Faith shines out from him like a lighthouse.

James takes a deep breath. He undoes the first button of the shirt he’s wearing under his sweater and pulls out a small bronze crucifix. “Okay. I’ll do it. Miss Moneypenny, take the Cobbs and when you see an opening, make a break for it. Q—” he turns to him and at once all of the resolve and strength and determination etched on his brow melts away into something terribly vulnerable. “Q, go with them. Please go with them.”

“What?—No! I’m not leaving you here _alone_ with that _thing_ —”

“I can do it, but not if you’re with me,” James says steadily, but a hint of pleading breaks into his voice. “I need—I _need_ to know you’re safe. I can’t do this if you’re not safe. Please. Please.”

Q steps closer. Through the broken windows the wind howls, a far cry from the placid breeze that James and Moneypenny had been standing in just minutes ago, smoking, when it seemed like their biggest problems in the world had existed outside of this house. “I,” he says fiercely, “am _not_ leaving you.”

“Q—”

“A _reason._ Do you remember that? Never take this for granted. And never be afraid.”

James’s expression barely shifts, but something about him crumples. “I’m not that strong.”

“You are. I know you are.” Q leans so close he can soak in his breath, his scent, his fear. “ _We_ are. Together.”

James takes a deep, shuddering breath. Eyes still afire, Q turns to Moneypenny and says, “I’ll distract Silva while James performs the exorcism. Don’t—” he says as James makes an aborted motion to draw him close. “He and I are—we’re the same. I can keep his attention on me. I know I can. _You_ need to get to Abby’s room. It’s the heart of the house, the place where the distortions in time and space were felt most keenly.”

“And me?” Moneypenny says, heart like a drum, everything in her vibrating at high frequency.

“Run,” Q says. It’s good advice.

– ♠ –

Q knows exactly where he’s going. He follows the floor plan of a house long demolished, makes his way around the obstacles of the present to the flicker of the past. He’s walked these steps before, distorted and viewed through the clouded glass of sleep, but he knows it still. The house groans and clatters around him, but he is hyperfocused on the scrape of his bare feet against the wood grain, the path he took in his dreams. Dishes fly throughout the air and shatter next to his head. The walls creak and scream under the weight of some terrible spirit. But nothing hits him, he goes unscathed through the halls of Silva’s private hell. He finds the door where he knew he would, as though a map to it had been carved into his soul.

He steps through into a room that is simultaneously the Cobb’s kitchen and Raoul Silva’s study. Silva’s grand old desk is empty, but the room still burns with his presence. He can hear him, laughing, as though the whole house were laughing. Whispering, as though the walls were leaning over and spitting into his ear. _You think to challenge me?_ Silva’s voice rings in his ears, a metallic series of echoes, the overlapping clatter of many voices woven into one. _Me? I’ll break your wings. I’ll eat your heart._

“Try,” Q dares. And standing with one foot in the present and one foot in 1780, he throws the full weight of his mental self like a battering ram careening against the psychic walls of the house.

Silva begins to laugh. Q begins to scream.

– ♠ –

James knows that Q has done it when the illusion of a hallway stretching out endlessly before him compresses and splinters into a normal corridor, with Abby’s door clearly marked with a cheerful butterfly poster. The house still resists him—the door clings to its frame stubbornly, and James has to shoulder his way in—and outside the wind still howls. But the worst of Silva’s tricks have dimmed and faded. Q is true to his word. He’ll occupy him for as long as he can. James shoves away the thought of what happens when he can’t any longer, though his heart feels strange in his chest, like it’s wandered off and done something stupid and it’s up to James to find it and scoop it back up and tuck it away where it will be safe.

The girl’s bedroom is a disaster zone. Her bedframe is overturned by the window; her broken knickknacks and toys are so much rubble strewn on the carpet. All of her windows have shattered, letting in a blazingly bitter blast of winter. And something of Hell lingers, by the splintered window-sashes, around the stained and glass-covered bedsheets. He can feel it in his throat, as thick and toxic as smoke. Q was right again. This is the heart of it all. This is where he has to do it.

James pulls off his crucifix and presses his lips to it. The chain cuts into his palm. He gropes for the clarity of focus, the intense sense of purpose, that is required for an exorcism. But all the while his heart beats, _Q. Q. Q._

Words he memorized long ago, just in case, rise to his lips. “In the name of the Father—”

 _Come now,_ a silky, terrible voice reverberates through the walls, through the floor, through his skull. _Why fight so hard? You are mine already. The war is already lost._

“—and of the Son—”

_You can’t possibly think this will work. You’re not good enough. You’re not strong enough. You’re no priest, James Bond. You’re hardly even a man._

“—and of the Holy Spirit—”

_Give up. Give in. I can stop this at any time._

“If that were true,” James says, “you would’ve done it already.”

_It’s true, that clever little bird downstairs is giving me some trouble. Preventing me from manifesting in this room. Keeping me from killing you where you stand. But that won’t last, James, you know it won’t. Wouldn’t you like to die together? Wouldn’t you like to hold his hand as he takes his last breath?_

James bares his teeth. “From all evil deliver us. Defend us in our battle—”

_It won’t work, James. To banish an entity as powerful as I’ve become, you need my name._

“I know your name, Raoul Silva.”

 _That was the name I took upon coming to this country. My true name, James. The name written on the soul I long ago served up to the Devil like a Christmas feast._ Laughter like the grind of bone against bone. _What is it, James? What is my name?_

James’s heart beats like it’s trying to escape. Silva is right. Without his name, he has no dominion over the inhuman _thing_ that Silva has become. He’s no exorcist, after all. He’s just a man, the best part of whom is downstairs battling for his life.

But he has to try. For Q.

He grits his teeth and says, _“Crux sacra sit mihi lux, non draco sit mihi dux_ —”

– ♠ –

They almost make it out. Almost.

Moneypenny cries out when she sees the front door as she flies across the foyer, the Cobb family hot on her heels. The door is swinging open and she can see the trees almost bending over in the wind, the clouds lying thick and suffocating across the lights of the night sky, and they are almost there, they _almost_ make it—

—but just as her hand grazes the knob, the walls _shift_ and bend and fold over the door until it’s gone, lost behind the infinite tiling of wallpaper and smooth plaster. She jerks her hand back and slams her fist against the wall where the door used to be, not totally convinced that it isn’t just an optical illusion, that if she tries hard enough she can punch through the wallpaper and pull back the fine wood panels and frosted glass windows from wherever they’ve vanished to.

She’s dreaming. She must be. One too many scary stories before bed and this is the result. But it all feels horribly real.

Maybe it’s time to rethink that cold rationality that’s underlaid every assumption she’s ever made about the nature of the world. A chair screams through the air and smashes into the wall right beside her head. Or maybe she can do all of that later. If there is a later.

“Windows,” she gasps out. “Living room. Go!”

But when they pile into the living room they’re greeted by a whirlwind of books, pages tearing and ink bleeding and spines ripping apart and Moneypenny has a terrible feeling that this is what the house wants to do to _them._ They can’t make it to the windows—the younger girl shrieks when a book shears too close to her hair—Moneypenny seizes a fireplace poker and bats a book aimed straight at her face to the floor. God, this will make one hell of a story one day, if anyone ever believes her. 

“Back,” she shouts, “get back, the door won’t stay hidden forever—”

– ♠ –

Walking into the mind of a witch so powerful he is more demon than man is like—like smashing your head against stained glass, all refracted light and colour and pain. Like falling into an iced-over lake and feeling frigid water freeze in your lungs. Like abandonment. Like loneliness. Q claws his way to the surface as he is buffeted from memory to memory, feeling bits of himself erode with every moment, feeling his essence dissolve like sugar in water. He’s four, and learning witchcraft at the knee of an aunt. He’s seven, and hearing about the awful vicious hunts that drove them from their homeland. He’s ten and performing his first animal sacrifice. He revels in lust and greed and wrath and defilement and exults in every stain on his soul, every inch of distance that grows between himself and God.

He is four and listening to his aunt say, “ _Now listen closely, Tiago_ —”

He is drawing a knife across the throat of a screaming girl and he is crying over a skinned knee and he _is_ the house, its rooms and its wings and its secrets, and he is taking apart his first Dell and he is feeling the agonizing tug of his soul being torn away and he is kissing James in a chapel and he is Q and he is Silva and he is becoming less Q and more Silva all the time, he is losing, he is losing.

 _James!_ he cries out. And then he’s underwater.

He is staring at Silva and he can see his face, his _true_ face, not the handsome mask of the human but the rotting husk of a person without a soul, eyes burning like hot coals and skin stretched over a gaping hole of a mouth. He is frightened. God, he’s frightened. _You see, little bird?_ a voice cool like water, a voice that promises a relief from all the pain, from all the fear, whispers to him. _You never stood a chance._

Maybe so. Maybe this is the end. Why is he fighting, again? He is so tired.

_Be mine. Be nothing._

He would’ve liked to see James one more time—

James.

 _James,_ he thinks, because somewhere in the back of his mind he has always known the way home.

 _NO,_ he tells Silva, and fashions for himself a coat of many-coloured light, a shield of every scrap of every memory that belongs to him, a barrier of James. A chance meeting in a church and a bandage over scraped skin and the shine of the streetlight on James’s worn but impeccably cared-for shoes and the burn of the apertifs at that fancy restaurant and _Good Omens_ at two in the morning and a blanket fort late in the night and a ring under his pillow and one stephanotis and wandering hands in an elevator and a crucifix print on his cheek and the fuss James makes over Gideon’s hairballs and tikka masala in the early morning when they’re back from a case and too tired to cook and the stupid car and the expression of pure contentment on James’s face when they go to the country and he can put the windows down and just _drive_ and all of it, every moment, every single moment brimming with so much of it, so much love. He holds it up against Silva like a bulwark against the dark. He can’t overpower him—love is not a miracle, but a promise—but he can make himself into a hard kernel of light between Silva’s teeth, an ache like conscience in the place where his should be. He can keep him here. He can give James time.

And without conscious thought, something happens that has never happened before. He thinks of James and he is _with_ James, standing in Abby’s ruined bedroom, feeling the words of the exorcism roll off his tongue as Silva taunts and sneers. It’s not like Silva devouring him, not at all. It’s like he and James have finally become close enough to become one person, like James is wrapped around him and he never has to let him go. James is him and he _is_ James and he holds up James’s crucifix that is also his crucifix and moves James’s lips that are also his lips and listens with James’s ears that are also his ears to Silva mock him about not knowing his name—

It’s too much to sustain. This is the farthest he’s ever stretched his psychic limits, and it is destroying him, he can taste the blood in his mouth that is also James’s mouth and feel the sensation of everything slipping away from him.

 _Tiago Rodriguez,_ he tells James, as much as you can speak to someone who is also a part of you. _His name is Tiago Rodriguez._

And then—black.

– ♠ –

James, eyes blazing, bares his teeth in a wild grin and snarls, “Tiago Rodriguez, by the power of God, _I condemn you back to Hell!”_

And the world is filled with screaming.

– ♠ –

When the door reappears, Moneypenny and the Cobbs burst out into the silent world and collapse on the dewy grass. Moneypenny lifts her face to the sky. Light glitters on her skin. The sun is rising.

– ♠ –

The paramedics are baffled, but, as with journalists, expressing fear in the face of the unknown is against the sacred laws of their profession. They gamely bandage up the scratches the Cobbs received from flying glass, wipe up Q’s nosebleed and check him for concussion, and ignore the husk of a house sagging on the lawn. Moneypenny watches the Cobbs cry as something they’d been carrying so long they hadn’t even noticed lifts from their shoulders. She smiles.

James and Q sit, exhausted, on the patio, sharing one shock blanket. James’s crucifix still dangles openly over his sweater. Q looks like he went ten rounds with a sleep deprivation golem and lost. Q leans his head on James’s shoulder and dozes. Moneypenny hovers over them, not sure if she’s intruding, but James meets her eye and with a tilt of his head invites her to join them. He looks different, now that the danger’s past. Softer around the edges. He doesn’t share the blanket, though.

“I hope,” he says, “we’ve given you quite enough to write about for one day, Miss Moneypenny.”

Q snorts, eyes still closed. Not asleep after all. Moneypenny smiles at him.

“I can certainly say that this has been one hell of a story,” she says. She has no idea what she’s going to tell her editor.

“If we haven’t scared you off for good, you’re welcome to return,” James offers. “We’ll give you a real interview. No demons involved.”

“Thanks. I might… take you up on that.” The crazy thing is, she really might. There’s something about James and Q Bond. Something that tells her that they’re not finished yet with her. And she’s sure not finished with them. “Look, I just wanted to say… thank you.”

Q’s eyes blink open. He surveys her with a soft, fuzzy gaze. “For what?”

“For them.” She points her chin at the Cobbs, curled together like a puppy pile on the lawn. “And… for me. For what I now know.”

“You’re very welcome, Miss Moneypenny,” Q says.

“Please,” she says. “Call me Eve.”

She stands and leaves them to each other. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees James press a kiss to Q’s crown. It makes more sense now, why they’d do this. They have each other, after all. A light against the night.

She tilts her face up to the sun and marvels at the world which, for the first time since she stepped back on London soil, looks wide-open and full of things just waiting to be understood and written about. Eve Moneypenny gets paid to be curious, and so she has the best job in the world. And somehow, it’s just gotten even more interesting. 

**Author's Note:**

> And that is the story of how Eve Moneypenny became the most renowned reporter of supernatural activity in Great Britain.
> 
> Follow me on [tumblr](http://midrashic.tumblr.com)! I'm very personable. If you like my work and want to support me, buy me a coffee.
> 
> This story will have a sequel. Comments are love, concrit is a warm fluffy slice of cake with double frosting.


End file.
